Unless the leaders make good on their statements about using the greater scale of the economic bloc to demand better terms of trade globally, the expanded Community is likely to be a continuation of the already damaging experience suffered by the ordinary people.
Even as South Sudan marks 10 years since it attained its independence from Sudan, the fragile peace is at risk of collapsing.
The European Union Timber Regulation of 2013 has proved ineffectual and it is still easy to ship illegally harvested teak, "the king of woods”, from South Sudan to Europe via India.
Alan Boswell, Senior Analyst, International Crisis Group explores South Sudan’s current crisis and political prospects.
A never-ending cycle of killing and looting has left South Sudan fragile and impoverished. Moreover, a kleptocratic class of politicians and generals at the top with deep ties to “international partners” has been benefitting from the conflict, which could explain why Africa’s youngest nation remains in a permanent state of political instability.
The current social and political engineering in South Sudan is an exact replay of the political processes that plunged the Sudan into the first civil war in 1955.
The highly hyped youngest country in the world has aged so fast that it now lies on the region’s sick bed in the hope that the High-Level Revitalisation Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which convened on February 5th 2018, will salvage something from its nearly five years of civil war.